Live house

A live house (ライブハウス) is a Japanese live music club – a music venue featuring live music. The term is a Japanese coinage (wasei eigo) and is mainly used in East Asia. It most frequently refers to smaller venues, which may double as bars, especially featuring rock, jazz, blues, and folk music.

History

The oldest live house is Coffee House Jittoku (拾得, after the Chinese monk Shide "Foundling")^[1] in Kyoto, founded in 1973 in an old sake warehouse. Soon afterwards, the idea spread through Japan. In recent years, similar establishments started to appear in big cities in South Korea, Taiwan and China and many of them are also locally called "live houses."

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